required to move and position the device, the idea that it would also have to fend for itself in a wrestling match had probably not been uppermost in their minds.
‘Khouri,’ Volyova said, ‘in about thirty seconds I’m going to release the
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘Well, sort of. But I feel I ought to warn you…’ Volyova’s voice faded in and out of clarity, reception compromised by the broiling energies of the propulsion beam, which she was now approaching at distances not usually considered wise for the organic. ‘It’s occurred to me that even if I succeed in destroying the cache- weapon… some part of the blast — something exotic, perhaps — might get sent back up the drive beam, into the propulsion core.’ A pause that was definitely intentional. ‘If that happens, the results might not be… optimal.’
‘Well, thanks,’ Khouri said. ‘I appreciate the morale-building.’
‘Damn,’ Volyova said, quietly and calmly. ‘There’s a slight flaw in my plan. The weapon must have hit the spider-room with some kind of defensive EM-pulse; either that or the radiation from the drive is interfering with the hardware.’ There was the sound — possibly — of someone making repeated attempts to throw antique metal switches on a console. ‘What I mean,’ Volyova said, ‘is that I don’t seem to be able to break free. I’m stuck to the bastard.’
‘Then shut off the damned drive — you can do that, can’t you?’
‘Of course; how do you think I killed Nagorny?’ But she didn’t sound optimistic. ‘
The Mademoiselle spoke now, sounding appropriately smug. ‘She’s dead, Khouri. And at the angle you’d now have to fire, half those weapons would be disabled to prevent them inflicting damage on the ship. You’ll be lucky to scorch the cache-weapon’s hull with what remains.’
She was right — almost without Khouri noticing, whole blocks of potentially available armament had safed themselves, since she was now requesting them to point dangerously close to critical ship components. What remained were the lightest armaments, almost by definition incapable of doing any serious damage.
Perhaps sensing this, something relented.
The weapons were suddenly more under Khouri’s control than not, and — she realised — the fact that the remaining systems were limited in their firepower was actually to her advantage. Her plan had changed. What she needed now was surgical precision, not brute force.
In the hiatus, before the weapons were regained by the Mademoiselle, Khouri ditched the prior target pattern and issued re-aiming orders. Her instructions were specific in the extreme. Now, oozing into position as if immersed in toffee, the weapons aligned themselves on the impact points she had selected. Not the cache-weapon now, but something else entirely…
‘Khouri,’ the Mademoiselle began, ‘I really think you should consider this…’
But by then Khouri had already fired.
Gouts of plasma streamed out towards the cache-weapon connecting — not with the weapon itself, but with the spider-room, neatly severing all eight of its legs, and then all four of its grapple-lines. The room flung itself away from the lancing spear of the drive, its legs truncated abruptly at the knees.
The cache-weapon drifted into the beam, like a moth brushing into an incandescent lamp.
What happened thereafter took place in an inhumanly brief series of instants; almost too rapid for Khouri to comprehend until afterwards. The physical exterior of the cache-weapon evaporated in a millisecond, boiling away in a gasp of predominantly metallic vapour. It was impossible to tell whether it was the touching of the beam which led to what followed, or whether, at the instant of its destruction, the cache-weapon was already committed to the act of turning itself inside out.
Either way, things did not proceed quite as its builders had intended.
Simultaneously — or as near as mattered — what was left of the cache-weapon beneath its eviscerated hide emitted a prolonged gravitational eruction, a burp of shearing spacetime. Something very horrible was happening to the fabric of reality in the immediate vicinity of the weapon, but not in the way which had been planned. A rainbow of bent starlight flickered around the curdling mass of plasma-energy. For a millisecond the rainbow was approximately spherical and stable, but then it began to wobble, oscillating unevenly like a soap-bubble on the point of bursting. A fraction of a millisecond later, it collapsed inwards, and accelerating exponentially, vanished.
For another moment there was nothing left, not even debris, just the normal star-speckled backdrop of space.
Then a glint of light appeared, shading to ultraviolet. The glint magnified and swelled, bloating into an intense, malignant sphere. The wave of expanding plasma hit the ship, juddering it so violently that Khouri felt the impact even with the cushioning gimbals of the gunnery. Data rushed in, telling her — not that she was particularly keen on knowing — that the blast had not seriously compromised any hull-based systems, and that the brief spike of background radiation from the flash was within tolerable norms. Gravimetric scans had abruptly returned to normal.
Spacetime had been punctured, penetrated at the quantum level, releasing a minuscule glint of Planck energy. Minuscule, that is, compared with the normally seething energies present in the spacetime foam. But beyond normal confinement that negligible release had been like a nuke going off next door. Spacetime had instantly healed itself, knitting back together before any real damage was done, leaving only a few surplus monopoles, low- mass quantum black holes and other anomalous/exotic particles as evidence that anything untoward had happened.
The cache-weapon had malfunctioned, badly.
‘Oh, very good,’ the Mademoiselle said, sounding more disappointed than anything. ‘I hope you’re proud of what you’ve done.’
But what had Khouri’s attention now was the absence streaking towards her, rushing through gunspace. She tried to back out in time; tried to disengage the link—
But she was not quite fast enough.
THIRTEEN
‘Seat,’ Volyova said, entering the bridge.
A chair craned eagerly towards her. She buckled herself in and then gunned the seat away from the bridge’s tiered walls, until she was orbiting the enormous holographic projection sphere which occupied the room’s middle.
The sphere was showing a view of Resurgam, although one might have easily concluded that it was really the desiccated eyeball of an ancient and mummified corpse, magnified several hundred times. But Volyova knew that the image was more than just an accurate portrayal of Resurgam dredged from the ship’s database. It was being imaged in realtime; captured by the cameras which were even now pointing down from the lighthugger’s hull.
Resurgam was not a beautiful planet, by anyone’s standards. Apart from the sullied white of the polar caps, the overall colour was a skullish grey, offset by scabs of rust and a few desultory chips of powder-blue near the equatorial zones. The larger oceanic water masses were still mostly cauled under ice, and those motes of exposed water were almost certainly being artificially warmed against freeze-over; either by thermal energy grids or carefully tailored metabolic processes. There were clouds, but they were wispy plumes rather than the great complex features Volyova knew one could usually expect from planetary weather systems. Here and there they thickened towards white opacity, but only in small gangliar knots near the settlements. Those were the places where the vapour factories were working, sublimating polar ice into water, oxygen and hydrogen. There were few patches of vegetation large enough to be seen without magnification down to kilometre-resolution, and by the same token no obvious visible evidence of human presence, save for a sprinkling of settlement lights when the planet’s nightside rolled around every ninety minutes. Even with the zoom, the settlements were elusive, since — with the
